James R. “Jim” Boddie, a pioneer of the programmable, single-chip digital signal processor, died on 2 December at his house in Canton, Ga., following an extended sickness. The IEEE senior member was 74.
Whereas working as an architect and designer at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., Boddie utilized his experience in signal processing algorithms to develop a brand new sort of semiconductor: the DSP. The built-in circuit, which Bell Labs known as DSP1, was introduced on the 1980 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). DSP1 turned one of many trade’s first profitable DSPs.
Jim led the event of 5 subsequent DSP generations, economically enabling quite a few purposes, many for the primary time, from AT&T’s gigantic phone switching programs to tiny digital hearing aids.
For his contributions as a group chief in addition to his technical improvements, Jim was elevated to Bell Labs Fellow. In 1988 he and IEEE Senior Member Richard A. Pedersen, a codeveloper of the DSP, obtained the IEEE Liebmann Award.
The primary digital sign processor
Jim was born in Tallassee, a small metropolis in Alabama. He obtained a bachelor’s diploma in electrical engineering in 1971 from Auburn University, in Alabama. After incomes a grasp’s diploma in EE two years later from MIT, he returned to Auburn to pursue a Ph.D. In 1976 he obtained his doctorate and started a yearlong postdoctoral fellowship at Bell Labs’ acoustic analysis division in Holmdel.
There he programmed a refrigerator-size DSP system to do real-time de-reverberation of speech and remove echoes in conference-room speakerphones.
Throughout his fellowship, he met IEEE Life Fellow Dan Stanzione, a Bell Labs group supervisor who recruited him to affix the corporate’s first DSP design group in 1977. Stanzione, who turned the eighth president of Bell Labs, stated in a 2015 interview with the Computer History Museum’s oral history project that his first assembly with Jim was “a fortunate day for me.” Jim arrived throughout the glory days of Bell Labs, when algorithm specialists, semiconductor specialists, and system designers labored for one firm, as a rule down the corridor from each other.
Previous to 1980, most sign processing purposes had been carried out with analog elements. Superior algorithms similar to low-data-rate speech coding and speech recognition had been validated within the digital area utilizing supercomputer simulations and had been too advanced to be carried out with analog designs. Against this, digital designs used racks of elements properly past industrial feasibility. The dream of an affordable, high-performance digital sign processor appeared far off, as no single DSP structure would work for all algorithms. Due to this fact Texas Instruments and related corporations offered common digital constructing blocks similar to multipliers and register information.
Stanzione’s objective was to create a extensively relevant DSP that might exchange his division’s {custom} analog filter designs. In time, the group homed in on a particular filtering utility: DTMF (dual-tone multifrequency) signaling, which decoded a cellphone’s dial tones into the dialed quantity to route calls. It could be deployed by new digital programs in ample quantity to justify the price of growing the DSP.
The group breadboarded the filters and located that with a intelligent structure, and a 4.5-micron full-custom negative-channel metal-oxide semiconductor—the very best course of expertise on the time—they might meet the efficiency requirement. Different associated purposes could be icing on the cake.
Jim made vital contributions to DSP1. Foremost amongst them was the design of its novel arithmetic unit.
After DSP1 was introduced on the 1980 ISSCC, it was not commercially obtainable exterior AT&T. It achieved high-volume manufacturing in AT&T programs, although.
Jim was promoted to supervisor of the DSP structure group in 1980 to set the route for subsequent variations.
A pacesetter and entrepreneur
DSP1 was quickly adopted by DSP2, with quicker efficiency and a larger reminiscence capability to fulfill high-volume demand and to extend the vary of purposes the place the expertise could possibly be used.
In parallel with the event of DSP2, Jim led a brand new structure, DSP32, which used floating-point arithmetic. For digital signal processing, floating-point arithmetic simplifies the job of sustaining precision, a near-impossible burden in essentially the most demanding algorithms.
Jim and his group introduced the DSP32 in a 1985 ISSCC doc, which obtained a Greatest Paper Award.
Afterward, his group returned to the drafting board and developed the DSP16, which used fixed-point arithmetic. Introduced on the 1987 ISSCC, DSP16 turned the world’s quickest DSP, a title it retained for a number of years.
In 1998 Jim left AT&T and helped discovered StarCore, a DSP design heart in Atlanta. It was funded by Agere Systems, which had acquired Bell Labs Microelectronics; Motorola; and, later, Infineon. The startup’s sponsors obtained unique rights to include StarCore’s DSP designs into their very own IC merchandise. Jim served as StarCore’s government director till his retirement in 2006.
StarCore’s architectures used an extended instruction phrase structure that encoded a number of, unbiased operations in a single instruction with a purpose to exploit parallelism in DSP code.
In 2002, after StarCore’s first designs had been launched, Will Strauss, president of market analysis agency Ahead Ideas, stated, “The mix of the brand new firm’s enterprise mannequin and world-class expertise choices characterize a dramatic change within the industry landscape.”
Life after the DSP
Jim was an early adopter of house computer systems, buying practically each mannequin that Apple offered. Together with a MIDI keyboard, he used the computer systems for music synthesis in addition to flight-simulation video games. He was an avid flier, not solely of simulators but in addition of personal plane.
He was a devoted ham radio operator—name signal NG2J—and took part in contests. Discipline Day was his favourite. The annual weekend occasion in June challenges ham radio lovers worldwide to function in distant places to simulate emergency circumstances and trade simulated emergency messages.
After retiring, Jim programmed a 3D virtual tour of the Alamo, a historic website in San Antonio. This system lets customers view the previous Spanish mission from any route in each the current and the previous. The tour, which launched in 2022, is on the market on the Alamo and on-line.
In the present day digital sign processing is pervasive. Help for its algorithms and purposes are a elementary requirement for nearly all programmable semiconductors. Jim’s contributions to DSP expertise can be remembered. Equally so, we and a whole bunch of others will bear in mind Jim for his form mentorship and clear imaginative and prescient.
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